Monthly Archives: November 2012

If you navigate your way to the AAS online content webpage, you’ll find a link to the Society’s digital image archive, GIGI. In GIGI you’ll discover a searchable database of over 50,000 images from the society’s collection - from maps to manuscripts, war images to newspapers, cartoons, illustrations and more. My personal favorite is the ...

Photograph Album. [1863-1866].
This album of over 150 cartes-de-visite images of American prints illustrates the methods used to distribute images in the nineteenth century. Many of the photographs were made by John B. Soule. Soule worked with lithographers, such as J. H. Bufford, to reproduce popular lithographed images of children, attractive women, kittens, and comical ...

Although now a full-time employee of AAS, my love for the Society began years before I started working here when it first introduced me to the thrill of researching in an archive. As a senior History major at the College of the Holy Cross, I was introduced to AAS by my thesis advisor, who suggested ...

Every Wednesday before Thanksgiving for the past fifty years, the Wall Street Journal has published excerpts from Nathaniel Morton's 1669 history of the Plymouth colony, New Englands Memoriall, on its editorial page. While Morton's history does contain the first published list of those who signed the Mayflower Compact, it features only a negligible account of ...

Some of us on the AAS staff are still recuperating from October’s bicentennial celebrations. There were three days of events, beginning with the Baron lecture by Patricia Nelson Limerick on Thursday night. On Friday morning the curators presented a celebration of bicentennial gifts, followed by lunch across the street at the Goddard Daniels House. On ...

Each year at the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, AAS has a booth on Cultural Row (booths given to local libraries to promote themselves). When regular visitors to the fair walk by our booth, they usually think one thing. Chocolate! Early on we had a dish with small candy bars or other chocolate confectionery delights ...

Central American archaeology may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of AAS, but check out this Facebook post from the Getty Research Institute about a new book called Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Americas, edited by their Director of Scholarly Programs. The post features a photograph of AAS ...

Drury, Anna H. The Blue Ribbons: A Story of the Last Century. Boston: Whittemore, Niles and Hall, 1856.
This is truly a mid-nineteenth-century creation: a fairy tale set in the eighteenth century! Alexis, a young boy growing up in Louis XIV’s France, encounters a beautiful and benevolent female fairy in the forest—who turns out to be ...

As a description of a professional trajectory in the research library world, it certainly makes for an impressive resume:
Library Assistant, American Antiquarian Society
Curator of Maps and Prints, American Antiquarian Society
Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, American Antiquarian Society
Director, Center for Historic American Visual Culture, American Antiquarian Society
At the same time, it’s not unheard of. ...

The 200th annual meeting provided the opportunity to celebrate many accomplishments and transitions, but among the most poignant were the retirements of three long-time colleagues: Gigi Barnhill and Caroline Sloat (who retired this summer) and John Keenum (who will retire at the end of the year). A blog post about Gigi’s retirement will appear in ...

In the next couple of months, Past is Present will be highlighting a number of gifts received in honor of the American Antiquarian Society’s bicentennial. Remember, there is still time to join the group of bicentennial donors.
It continues to surprise me when I talk with people who are laboring under the misconception that AAS focuses ...

Leicester Academy, List of Students, 1812-1817.
Leicester Academy was founded in 1784 in Leicester, Massachusetts, and functioned as a private, co-educational institution until 1921, when it was leased to the town to be used as a public high school. This volume, containing a list of students, will be added to the already substantial collection of school ...

Hello fellow citizens,
As we vote today, here is a look back 200 years. In 1812 there were eighteen states and the voting cycle ran from October 30, when four states voted, until December 1, when South Carolina was the last to choose its electors.
Image from a later Civil War era election, How free ballot is ...

A familiar voice begins, “…two years ago, it was a great honor to be elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society,” as President Bill Clinton sends his bicentennial congratulations via video.
The Society has elected fourteen U.S. Presidents to membership, beginning with John Adams in 1813. Given the demands on a President’s – and a ...